The goal of most business and academic presentations is to convey a large amount of information in a concise and coherent manner. This typically involves the visual medium, e.g., the showing of slides, which has become the preferred method with the advent of presentation software such as Microsoft's PowerPoint. A slide show generally consists of a number of slides that are arranged in a predetermined order. This order is then traversed by the presenter during the presentation as he or she navigates from slide to slide.
However, the complexity of some presentations begs for a departure from this traditionally linear arrangement. For example, presenters often prepare many more slides about a topic than they necessarily intend to use. By keeping some slides “in reserve”, presenters have the option of covering one or more particular aspects of the presentation in greater detail should the need arise, e.g., as a result of a question from the audience or when the audience shows heightened interest. Presenters often keep such additional material in separate slide shows because current presentation tools provide inadequate support in a situation like this.
Slide sorters, which are essentially a collection of “thumbnails” (small visual representations of slides that are similar enough to the slides they represent to be recognizable as such, e.g., they may be simply miniature versions of the slides), provide a reasonably good overview of which slides are in a presentation. However, slide sorters typically arrange the slide thumbnails in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom arrangement. This arrangement, akin to how text is read in a book, does not present slides in one continuous linear arrangement, since there is a visual jump after every line (row) of slides. On the other hand, an arrangement of slides more complicated than a standard linear arrangement does not lend itself well to this kind of standard thumbnail representation.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a method of organizing and presenting slides that gives the presenter the flexibility to easily depart from a single predetermined sequence of slides.